One issue common to many data communication or storage systems is the corruption of data, for example, by noise in a communication channel or write/read processes in a storage system. One technique to remedy the data corruption is to use an error-correcting code (ECC) or forward error correction (FEC) code. ECC and FEC add redundant data or parity data to user data such that user data can be recovered by a receiver or reader even when a number of errors (up to the capability of the code being used) were introduced, for example, during the process of transmission or corruption on a storage.
A lot of different coding schemes have been developed over the years, for example, Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, Turbo codes, etc. More recently, low density parity check (LDPC) codes have become widely used. All these codes, however, are computation complex and still in need of improvements.